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Comment by Alterlife | Hacker News Reader

Traffic in India looks similar to ants: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RavLjmWdMK4

But really it's each driver executing their own internal 'greedy algorithm' to get themselves off the road as soon as possible.

When traffic jams occour, it's the blokes who break the rules (the ones drive on the wrong side of the road or drive aggressively) who get to their destination first.

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Kind of similar to the traffic in Saigon, Vietnam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKLWZjBu2iQ

I was in both of those places (Saigon and all over India) over the last few month. That's the first thing I thought of when I read the headline.

Wow, there are a lot of scooters/bikes in Saigon! If everyone would drive instead only cars I guess traffic throughput would collapse.

That doesn't actually look noticably crazier than traffic at some times and places in NYC. The main difference is NYC has more traffic lights and human traffic enforcement officers -- but only 4 wheeled vehicles are highly likely to obey those -- pedestrians mostly don't and 2 wheeled vehicles vary, so you can certainly see reminiscent scenes here. I think I might actually prefer to traverse that intersection than say, biking in a hurry from 14th to 57th on 8th ave. during evening rush hour. Most of the conflict looks like just the usual "through traffic versus left turners" which happens anywhere there aren't signals with separate left turn phases

It definitely is dangerous, but the video seems to be running at 2x, perhaps to make it seem more dangerous than it is actually. The pedestrians walking around are a give away.

Just to clarify, this video is sped up. But yea, I get the point.

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